Honestly, Danyl, what part of living in NZ for the last 40-odd years has left you unprepared for this sort of development? Personally, I think that Te Papa buying sports memorabilia unrelated to rugby is a radical and progressive development. Baby steps…

Thanks @Andrew. I do remember reading that article and then as now I have to wonder if it is not actually a good news story. Obviously the former staff are highly regarded enough in their sunset industry that they could get other jobs, and obviously there is the VUP to service local authors, allowing Te Papa to concentrate on its knitting. The one downside I can see is that VU has always been so prissy that we’re unlikely to see them publish any more collections of Victorian smut🙂

“It’s a great thrill for New Zealand and an item that has so much to tell us about our history, and the history of sport.”

It would be nice if the “so much to tell us about our history” promise turns out to have more credibility than the “great thrill for New Zealand” promise (I was profoundly un-thrilled), but somehow I doubt it.

I understand that when Rick Ellis did his walk around of the Te Papa departments and staff after his appointment, he found himself in the conservation department. Apparently he asked them whether they collaborated with DOC very often.

I look forward to the Te Papa national Singlet Tour in which a bloody great black bus goes from town to village to town. All funded by gummint cut backs to wannabe artists and writers who never would have made it anyway.

yes, it is amazing that they want to fund the purchase of something that is a significant moment in NZ history. I wonder how many New Zealanders will see the singlet as oppose read one of the publications? I wonder how many New Zealanders are familiar with Peter Snell and his obviously minor achievement of winning Olympic gold medals compared to the cultural brilliance that the publishing company (which was obviously bank rolled by the tax payer ) would publish…

“26.yes, it is amazing that they want to fund the purchase of something that is a significant moment in NZ history”
Indeed! because if they HADN’T bought it, it would have been shredded: recycled and made into eco-friendly wall insulation for retrofitting older houses. My life is meager and sparse due to the lack of access to Sir Ed’s crampons, John Walker’s shorts or Brendon McCullum’s box.

David Farrar considers you an oh so awful snob Danyl! Farrar clearly doesnt like unregulated words from high falutin’ smarty pants types. Such words may lead to thinking, imagination and wonder. You cant put those in a glass case to gawk at like an icon, a reverent confirmation of our cultural preference for anything that doesnt require asking unsettling questions or having vaguely subversive thoughts! We all know that things you can’t monetise and capture in a case just cause problems, eh? Intellectuals. Old Adolf at comment 24, everyones favourite collector of children’s toys that accidentially landed on his lawn, namesake knew what to do with errant intellectuals!

Seems a reasonable purchase to me. NZ’s culture’s been heavily influenced by sport and sporting achievement. You can ague whether that’s good or bad but a national museum certainly has a legit interest in sporting history.

It is admittedly more significant to New Zealand history than all the statues of orcs and elves dotted throughout Te Papa. It’s a problem, though, that most New Zealanders don’t know much about own history. Like, our actual history: wars and other major events that shaped the nation and have huge consequences today, and instead we get this pseudohistory based on very inconsequential things, like winning a gold medal that are inflated up into great and celebrated events because they (very very briefly) won us the approval of the rest of the world.

@Danyl: Which wars do you think NZers are underinformed about? Both WW1 and WW2 are massive presences in almost everybody’s understanding of history. If anything I’d say the opposite is true, the popular understanding of history is based too much on the idea of history as a series of “charismatic” events (wars, disasters, sharp economic dysjunctions) and too little on long term, subtle effects (counterculture, liberalisation, atomisation).

It’s funny, growing up in the South Island, I was always told (not by my actual formal history teachers) that the New Zealand wars were a regional event that had little effect outside the Central North Island.

Yep, now that Te Papa has done a good job on WW1 it needs to do both WW2 and warfare in NZ. Maybe the old Dominion Museum, the site of the main and excellent WW1 exhibition, could be expanded to become the NZ war museum covering the period from the musket wars to Afghanistan and Iraq. It would be a great space for something that comprehensive. Gradually, Te Papa is improving its performance but it is still very disappointing compared with what it could be. The Peter McLeavey biography by the Te Papa Press is the best from that source I have read but I am pretty sure it would have been published elsewhere if Te Papa had not taken it on.

War is pretty fundamental to our history and to making sense of our past and only if we are very lucky indeed will it not be a a part of our future. And with even more luck those wars will be elsewhere rather than here. So not much of an issue with a possible oversupply of war museums. We also have dedicated museums for the army and the air force and the former is pretty good on the realities of war.

I assume you are referring to the Auckland War Memorial Museum as the other one? While it’s a great display of hardware it doesn’t deal much with the causes of the two wars it commemorates or, aside from a few small displays, the reality of war on the ground, sea and air.. It is also an explicitly Auckland museum focused on remembering the dead from within the old Auckland provincial boundaries.

The reason I suggest the Musket Wars as a starting point is because they and the NZ Wars that followed are quite closely linked and had an impact on Maori and English perceptions of who possessed or occupied or was linked with particular pieces of land and for how long. They also had an impact on the ability of Maori groups to manage the impact of the arrival of the settlers. The impacts were particularly large in Tamaki Makaurau and Taranaki. In a sense the muskets represented the impact of the outside world as much as the settlers did. Both had a tremendous impact on the use and possession of land.

“Can you seriously say people don’t know enough about WW2? It’s hard to think of a war that’s less obscure.”

I sure can. People under 50 would, I think, know more about WW1 than WW2 because of the impact of ANZAC Day. The people who experienced WW2 directly are almost gone, their children, the boomers, are getting on and after that there’s a very thin level of knowledge about it. In our museums we have quite a bit of hardware from WW2 but not much explanation.